Time for a little detour into the virtual world to visit stadtgarten.org. You already are familiar with the Lichtenberger Stadtgarten – it’s a place as well as a concept for the shared, community-based farming of vegetables in the city. But what is the difference between that and stadtgarten.org? Over time, stadtgarten.org will become a tool – a tool which will help with the self-organization of productive vegetables gardens. It will help gardens save time with coordination (to spend more time gardening!), help to collect knowledge and perhaps to make it much easier to sell enough vegetables to cover running costs.
Our enthusiasm for the virtual and real worlds and how they connect is not new. The idea of how you can connect things like fruit, vegetables, and the places they grow in to a ‚placeless‘ web platform is something we tried out before, when we both conceptualized and built mundraub.org together with 3 other like-minded people.
That’s why the conception and development of the platform stadtgarten.org is something we will continue to do on a private basis at the same time as the work in the Lichtenberger Stadtgarten. So far the connection between the two is that we use the stadtgarten.org platform to blog about news and activities related to the Lichtenberger Stadtgarten. In 2012, we will continue to develop the tool to make coordinating the garden as easy as possible, so that any one gardener is not left with the large amount of organization and communication work to do (see one of our earlier posts).
If there is someone who seriously has the ambition to help us with the development of the platform, then they are more than welcome. If you have experience with programming, project development, or other related skills, and you are happy to commit at least a day per week to the work, then just let us know.